The future’s impossible disciplines

Abstract

In this commentary, I want to stay with three questions: where exactly are we talking about when we are talking about the geographies of the impossible? Is speculative method necessarily transformative? What happens when we base our vision for future research on seeking new territory rather than examining regimes of production of our own geographical knowledge?

Political ecologies of the ordinary

August 2021 came to an end as thousands of Afghans scurried into Hamid Karzai International Airport in the dim hope of embarking on US military aircrafts, then repurposed to evacuate US troops and their Afghan allies. The frantic flee was a reaction to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban that marked a decisive end to America's longest war. Amidst the scarcity of conventional reportage, one piece of phone footage went viral in which an unidentified number of asylum seekers fell from a soaring plane – silently and unceremoniously – dead to the ground. A few days into the evacuation operation, hundreds of civilians were killed in a suicide explosion by ISIS-K in the airport, and a dozen more, including eight children, in a reprisal attack by a US military drone at home.

This can all be the stuff of novels, written against a background of complicating riskscapes of climate change, humanitarian concern, abandonment by the international community and drastic increases in health issues (Masood et al., 2022; Sayed and Sadat, 2022). The plight of Kabul's stowaways, and the geography that they are fleeing, does indeed lend itself to the lexicon that we use to describe fictional artefacts – but only too conveniently: it is dramatic, panoramic, tragic, sublime, absurd, dystopian, surreal, (anti)climactic. On an affective level, the event demands a relationship in the order of a reader to speculative fiction, which may help us imagine how a ‘New Weird geography’ transpires from the ‘breakdown of old ones’ and to ‘adjust to worlds governed by novel social and ecological rules and relations’ (Turnbull et al., 2022: 1221). At the same time, the havoc wreaked on Kabul is nothing but ordinary, everyday and completely possible. ‘The answer’ to catastrophes of this kind and the suffering that they bring about, as Veena Das insists, is not resorting to the language of ‘the transcendent’ but seeing the ways that they descend ‘into everyday life’ (Das, 2007: 15). In this act of witnessing, it is imperative to acknowledge that the borders between what is regarded as possible and its negation are a mere linguistic construct, a speech act couched in its own geopolitical assumptions.

This commentary responds to Lucas Pohl's (2024) concept of ‘geographies of the impossible’, published in Dialogues in Human Geography. I start at the end; I concur with Pohl's conclusion in advocating for loosening the imaginative scope of research practice in tackling the demand of making ‘possible tomorrow what is impossible today’, as well as granting the space for geographers to work with ‘new actors, function according to their own logics, and create extraordinary encounters’ (2024). Diverse and unconventional methods have the potential to discursively deconstruct the imaginaries that underpin the production of political-ecological knowledge in the hope of collating a ‘mode of thought oriented toward the construction of a sustainable world, grounded in its geographical and cultural diversity’ (Leff, 2015: 65).

That said, Pohl's intervention prompts my thinking about a common fault line in current conjectures about future disciplines. Pohl's argument relies on making a distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ impossibilities, with absolute impossibilities opening the field of research to ‘fictional and artistic approaches’ (2024). I am uneasy about the sense of place that underlies such recognition of impossibility; for it implies distributing methods for humanistic research from an alleged space of the possible to an imaginary geography of the impossible. In reponse, I want to stay with three questions: where exactly are we talking about when we are talking about geographies of the impossible? Is speculative method necessarily transformative? What happens when we base our vision for future research on seeking new territory rather than examining regimes of production of our own geographical knowledge?

The ontological turn and experimenting with the future

Early on in his piece, Pohl proposes that the contemporary moment is defined by the ‘fact’ of the increasing likelihood of ‘the impossible’ and the challenge of governing such futures through anticipation. Certain manifestations of climate change, in particular sea level rise, amount to obvious suspects as they necessitate ‘imagining a world in which most of today's political, economic, and social realities, especially in the Global North, no longer work’. Knowing this warrants welcoming ‘the impossible’ as a new ‘spatio-temporal category of geographical research’ for the role that it is destined to play in future institutional, political, and social action. Climate change is indeed forcing us to think through our disciplinary assumptions behind geographical categories. But I am intrigued by the phrase ‘especially in the Global North’. It is as if Pohl pictures an invisible dividing line between the North and the South, with the South being the location of possibilities that cannot exist in the North, at least for the time being. To take this stance earnestly is to adopt an unexamined self-positioning in the Global North, as the geography of the discipline.

I appreciate this provocation in the context of the widespread interdisciplinary call in the humanities and social sciences for defamiliarising academic norms in times of mass environmental destruction (Bould, 2021; Haraway, 2016; Holt, 2022; Hoyer, 2023; Tsing, 2015). Such thought experiments with the future unfold in the spirit of ‘Anthropocene ontopolitics’, as David Chandler aptly names it. Anthropocene ontopolitics shifts from a modernist worldview ‘which seeks to govern on the basis of the knowledge of biological or ecological life and its optimisation’ to a form of governing that ‘seeks to adapt or respond to the world rather than seeking to control or direct it’ (Chandler, 2018: 20–21). This reorientation voices a legitimate concern in keeping academic practice viable at a time where we are all in uncharted waters for the future of interdisciplinary research, as we face the petrifying paradox of being responsible for Anthropogenic damage and yet feeling incompetent in our attempts to fix it (Latour, 2014). The result has been renewed attention to regimes of knowledge production and practice from the Global South, including Indigenous lifeways, animistic epistemologies, afro-futurisms, and navigational skills of illegalised migrants and their enablers.

One by-product of this ‘ontological turn’ is the contemporary tendency to champion alternative ontologies in the hope that they could substitute our methodological ineptitude in dealing with ecological calamity. Even when the method has a claim on innovation – often expressed in the terms of decolonial politics, engagement with the non-human, or Southern ontologies – research can quickly run into ‘the discipline's on-going struggles with epistemologies of segmentation’ so deeply entrenched in Eurocentric thought (Sundberg, 2014: 35). Take myriad contentions in favour of foregrounding Indigenous worldviews despite warnings of challenges for legitimisations of Indigenous ways of being in the world ‘within theorizations of ontology’ in the western academy, ‘given the ongoing (neo)colonial relations that shape geographic knowledge production’ (Hunt, 2014: 27). Is there still potential for ushering in an academic practice that connects cultural analyses of ecological degradation to social implementations of such knowledge via a deep engagement with Southern ontologies.

There may be. But the link remains largely unrealised in humanities scholarship beyond the occasional flair of manifestos, partly because of rigid academic habits and noisy avenues of prestige, and partly due to the sheer difficulty of major transdisciplinary breakthroughs. The answer, if there is one, might lie in Arturo Escobar's (2020) two-tiered approach for researching ‘the proposition of other possible reals’. Accomplishing this requires considering spaces that are open to the reality of alternative worlds, ‘in which the real and the possible are conceived differently’. It also entails a critical examination of the ‘practices that have constituted us, the people of modernity’, as subjects who believe in dualistic ontologies of ‘the real’, including, among others, the scientific truth, the individual, and markets as self-constituted entities (Escobar, 2020: 13). The risk is that we reproduce new geographical vocabularies vacated from a genuine appreciation of land and kinship relations. Or worse, we may venture even further into the exuberance that encourages the old normative cartography outside of context and place by abstracting ‘foreign’ geographies and diluting their reality to an attendant of the apparatuses of future global governance.

Creativity and the disciplinary impossible

It has now grown into an academic cliché that speculative thought can deliver us to a blueprint for action in dealing with ever-growing ecological threat. Porous, promiscuous, and playful, speculative method has evolved into a popular strand of inquiry across the humanities and social sciences today, from environmental design (Dolejšová et al., 2023) to human geography (Williams and Keating, 2022) and political sociology (Savransky, 2021). If speculative method works – the thinking goes – it will result in tricking ourselves into not repeating ourselves. One way to achieve this is to make our relationship as academic subjects to method less stable through embracing ‘speculative action’ in research that foregrounds ‘openness, uncertainty and hesitation’ in lieu of established methodological practices (Meskus and Tikka, 2024: 209). There is a bitter pill to swallow here: that we cannot get to less destructive futures by way of trying yet again the methodologies that are born out of well-worn academic practices, and the institutions that have shaped and accredited them, but by peeling back to the stories that we have been telling ourselves about the world and listening to those that we have suppressed with various degrees of violence.

This reparative ethos performs a kind of renewed academic membership in the Anthropocene at the time when more practitioners are facing the limits of their disciplines. One could only hope that more creative methods can lead to a broader archive of thought beyond what has been lost, to engage with what remains of a broken world, and to help reconstitute it affirmatively towards pluralist forms of governance. But the idea of unconventional approaches as essentially in the service of these objectives remains a presumption. For all its potential, the speculative mode can quickly solidify its own language game, wrapped in an easily imitable vernacular and its own set of institutional currencies. ‘What if’, as Christopher Jones puts it, ‘creativity is, on balance, a threat to the very survival of our species? What if the creativity enterprise is an evolutionary cul-de-sac?’ (Jones, 2023: 2). What remains of our novel practices when we ponder our ignorance about whether disciplinary creativity is paving or inhibiting the way towards saner planes?

We miss the point if we define the relevance of future disciplines in terms of their capacity to appropriate new grounds. The question is not so much how to devise novel approaches, but how to play the balance between creating new research practices and staying alert to hegemonic underbellies of methods, announced in the name of Southern geographies.